The Sensemakers Club is a community-powered education space where curious people come to grow without performing or pretending to have it all figured out.
Are you a sensemaker?
A sensemaker is someone who helps people understand complex, messy, or ambiguous situations and turn that understanding into better decisions and action.
It’s not a job title.
It’s a role someone plays when clarity is needed. Some people make sense for a season, and some of us are professionals and hobbyists.
You might be a sensemaker if you...
- Translate between teams
- Fix structural issues no one else sees
- Clock patterns others don’t
- Care deeply about clarity and inclusion
- Question what’s next
- Maintain systems that prevent chaos
- Document what others skip
This week at the club
Our discussion groups meet on video live every weekday, below is this week’s schedule. See full calendar.
2 PM ET AI Playground
Hosted by Dan Cooney
A hands-on space to experiment with AI tools, share what you're discovering, and play alongside fellow sensemakers on the frontier.
2 PM ET Making Sense of Change
Hosted by Skipper Chong Warson & Laura Chance
A curious group exploring the complexities of change and develops frameworks for effectively creating, embracing, or managing it across various scales and domains.
2 PM ET Ethics Open Mic
Hosted by Brenda Ray & Vladimira Girginova
A thoughtful group focused on exploring the ethical implications of sensemaking work and addressing challenging questions without fear of the unknown.
2 PM ET Making Sense of Other Humans
Hosted by Erin Rodat-Savla & Karen Brothers
A brave group focused on understanding and improving teamwork dynamics, navigating conflicts, and fostering productive relationships without burnout.
2 PM ET Making Sense of Complexity & Chaos
Hosted by Matt Arnold
A strategic group exploring navigating complexity and sensemaking in both structured and chaotic environments.
What’s going on?
Week of May 18, 2026
Abby Covert
Chief Sensemaker
Last week was a whirlwind of welcome new members, and preparing for the 3rd Annual Sensemakers Salon. Monday brought our most well attended Beginner’s Meeting (May 11) of all time! Tuesday’s The Analog Leap: Sketching to Expand Your Sensemaking (May 12) was the fifth installment of Uday Gajendar's monthly analog practice workshop, guiding participants through embodied exercises — visualizing flavors and drawing multi-perspective vignettes — as a deliberate break from digital tools and a way to rewire creative and cognitive range. Making Sense of Facilitation (May 14) opened an honest conversation about the hidden emotional and cognitive costs of facilitation work: the energy drain, the "therapist without a license" role, and how practitioners recover and prepare. Then it was time for the 3rd Annual Sensemakers Salon. In Room A was a marathon session featuring four back-to-back presentations: Chad Rieck on identifying personal core values using the "big rocks" metaphor and Brené Brown's values list; Samantha Sanford on stream-of-consciousness writing and brain-dumping as a clarity practice; Samantha Voelkel on the assumptions our brains make constantly — and how to notice them; ending with a live tabletop sensemaking game designed by yours truly. Meanwhile simultaneously, in Room B, Matt Arnold talked about building teams that can metabolize complexity through collaborative sensemaking; Bill Dorman on linguistic empathy and why shared vocabulary doesn't guarantee shared meaning; Rebecca Hathaway on RPG-style "character trading cards" as a tool for team self-knowledge; and Joe Elmendorf on the power of rough, hand-drawn "shitty maps" as a Trojan horse for real-time sensemaking.
Themes from last week:
- The analog and the rough as cognitive tools.
- Words, meaning, and the gap between them.
- Sensemaking as infrastructure, not event.